Tuesdays With Dorie: Whole Wheat Bread and Cranberry Walnut Pumpkin Loaf November 27, 2012

This is my TuesdaysWith Dorie catch-up. I actually made both of these at the appropriate time but since I was participating in VeganMoFo, I was not able to post anything that was not vegan.

For the week of September 18th, I guess I just forgot to post, Whole Wheat Bread was the recipe and it was hosted by Michele of Veggie Num Nums and Teresa of The Family That Bakes Together. This bread was actually very easy to make and pretty straight forward. I mostly just had this bread in the morning toasted with butter and jam.

For the week of October 2 the recipe was Cranberry-Walnut Pumpkin Loaf which was hosted by Rebecca at This Bountiful Backyard. This recipe can be found on page 108 of Baking With Julia. For this recipe I actually made some modifications. First, I used fresh pumpkin because I had never roasted my own and then put it in a recipe. Usually I just buy the canned stuff and that is that. I also substituted dried cranberries for the fresh because at the time I was unable to find fresh cranberries.

The bread actually turned out great. This is another one that I ate for breakfast toasted with some butter. It was perfect with a cup of black tea. Since the recipe made 3 small loaves, I actually only ate1 loaf and froze the other 2.

Tuesdays With Dorie: Buttermilk Crumb Muffins November 6, 2012

This weeks Tuesdays With Dorie is being represented by Alisa of Easier Than Pie with the recipe for Buttermilk Crumb Muffins, which is located on page 207 in Baking With Julia.

I was reading a lot of peoples aversion to shortening aka Crisco this week on the P & Q. I thought it was pretty interesting since most traditional icing recipes like Wilton’s Buttercream recipe is pretty much all shortening. Personally for icing I find that recipe too sickly sweet so I always stick with an Italian Buttercream. But I just thought it was pretty funny that a lot of people were disgusted with the amount of shortening and either swapped it out with a healthy alternative (apple sauce) or just used butter. I understand the health alternative, but REALLY butter isn’t that much of a better alternative. Although, I was that person that ate these warm with butter, and they were yummy.

To each their own.

This recipe was actually really straight forward and I ended up making 12 standard size muffins plus 2 large muffins aka Texas size. So ideally the recipe makes 16 standard size muffins. The only thing I changed about the recipe was to increase the cinnamon to 1 teaspoon because I love the flavor of cinnamon. With the weather getting cold and the leaves turning, cinnamon is one of those spices that I love having in baked goods. It reminds me of Fall and Christmas.

Reasons that I have been Missing in Baking Action

Okay, so this post is mostly going to have pictures and just one recipe.

First, I was working on this

and this

for my brother-in-law’s wedding.

Before that we found out about this

and kept it a secret until after the wedding because that wouldn’t have been nice. So we have another little one coming around May 22nd, but I predict the beginning of May.

When making a wedding cake and you end up with left over lemons, raspberry puree, and vanilla-lemon sugar syrup, what do you do?

You make Raspberry-Vanilla Lemonade.

Raspberry-Vanilla Lemonade

2/3 cup raspberry puree
1 cup fresh squeezed lemon juice
1 cup sugar syrup
4-6 cups water, depending on taste

Put everything in a pitcher and stir. Serve over ice and enjoy.